Product
Onboarding a New Buyer: Let Them Ask the App Instead of You
A buying handover doesn't stall on judgment. It stalls on a hundred small lookups, and most of them have an answer that doesn't need you.
The handover is slowed by lookups, not judgment
The owner can explain how they buy in an afternoon: which suppliers they trust, when they order ahead of a busy season, what they would rather run short on than overstock. That part transfers quickly because it is a conversation. What transfers slowly is everything underneath it.
For the first few weeks, a new buyer's day is made of small questions. Where do the lead times live? What's arriving this week? How many of the best seller are left? How do I change a supplier's minimum? Each one is quick to answer, and each one lands on the owner. The owner loses a few minutes and the thread of whatever they were doing. The new buyer waits, or guesses, or stops asking so as not to be a nuisance. That last outcome is the expensive one, because a guess about a lead time ends up in a purchase order.
The problem isn't unique to buying. McKinsey estimated that knowledge workers spend about a fifth of their week searching for and gathering information. A new hire, who doesn't yet know where anything is, sits at the heavy end of that.
A new buyer asks two kinds of question
Listen to a new buyer for a day and the questions sort into two piles.
Store questions have answers in your data. "What arrives this week?" "How many Classic Mugs do I have?" "Which supplier has the longest lead time?" Normally these go to the owner, or to a report the new buyer has to find and learn to read first.
Product questions have answers in how the tool works. "How do I set a supplier's lead time?" "Where do I change an order minimum?" Normally these go to the owner too, or to the docs.
Atlas takes both. For store questions it queries your synced store data and answers with specifics. The AI Assistant page's own example exchanges: "What arrives this week?" gets "2 POs, 380 units," and "How many Classic Mugs do I have?" gets "24 on hand." Bigger answers arrive as sortable, expandable tables you can pop out and export to CSV. For questions about Assisty itself, Atlas answers from the product knowledge base instead of sending anyone to the docs. Asked how to set a supplier's lead time, it says to open Settings → Suppliers, pick the supplier, and set "Lead time (days)", then offers to take you there or to apply the new value if you just tell it.
Questions a new buyer asks, and what the AI Assistant and Supplier Management pages say Atlas does.
| New-buyer question | Kind | What Atlas does |
|---|---|---|
| “What arrives this week?” | Store | Queries your synced store data and answers with specifics. The example answer is “2 POs, 380 units” |
| “How many Classic Mugs do I have?” | Store | Answers from live store data. The example answer is “24 on hand” |
| “How do I set a supplier's lead time?” | Product | Answers from the product knowledge base: Settings → Suppliers → “Lead time (days)”, and offers to take you there or apply the value |
| Checking a suggested quantity | Explainability | Every suggested quantity opens into the analysis that produced it |
| “Change Acme Supply's lead time to 7 days.” | Action | Applies it conversationally. Tomorrow's reorder suggestions use it |
Rows are drawn from the AI Assistant and Supplier Management feature pages.
Where the rules live: the supplier record
The most useful thing a new buyer can learn early is where the buying rules are kept. In Assisty they sit on the supplier. Suppliers aren't a contact list: each one carries the lead times, order cycles, and minimums that decide when you reorder and how much. Lead Time, Reorder Cycle, Min Stock Cover Days, and order minimums and maximums are set once, and the buying table's suggested quantities use them automatically. Where one product differs from the rest, it is overridden per variant: supplier SKU, cost, minimum order quantity, case quantity.
That gives a new buyer a map. When a suggested quantity looks surprising, the explanation is often on the supplier record or in a variant override, not in the owner's head. (For what each field means, see Your reorder suggestions are only as real as your supplier setup.) Every suggested quantity opens into the analysis that produced it, so "why this number?" is something the new buyer can check before asking anyone.
The supplier directory handles the first pass: search by name or email, filter by status, sort by lead time or product count. When a rule does need to change, the change can be made conversationally. The Supplier Management page's example is "Change Acme Supply's lead time to 7 days." Atlas replies that it's done and that tomorrow's reorder suggestions will use it. Nobody has to find the right screen first.
Build a self-served first week
Give the handover one rule: ask Atlas first, and bring the owner only the calls that need judgment. What's on hand, what's arriving, where a setting lives, why the buying table suggested a quantity: those go to Atlas. Whether to push a supplier on price, whether to buy deep before a busy season, what to do about a supplier who keeps shipping late: those go to the owner.
Answers also end in the action that follows. When Atlas finds something worth doing, it offers the action as a one-tap chip: add items to a purchase order, expedite what's about to run out, cap a quantity to your max stock. A new buyer goes from the question to the task without first learning every path through the app.
For the moments when a new buyer doesn't know what to ask, the Ask Rail suggests questions worth asking on every page, generated from your own data. That mechanism has its own post.
What the owner still owns
None of this hands over the judgment. Supplier relationships, negotiation, and the exceptions no rule anticipated stay with the owner, and a new buyer learns them best by watching and asking. What changes is what those conversations are about. When the lookups go to Atlas, a question that reaches the owner is one only the owner can answer.